Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2009                                                                                                                                                                                  

Strange Affinities: Biblical Scholarship and the Rise of Racism

A Speech to a Protestant Seminary in Germany

Hitler did not achieve most of his political and military goals, but on the Jewish question he succeeded remarkably. If his anti-Semitic propaganda found resonance, its success can be credited in large measure to the unrelenting anti-Jewish Christian theological discourse that linked Nazi propaganda with the traditions and moral authority of the churches. That link was proclaimed with enthusiasm by Nazi Christians: "In the treatment and decision of National Socialism against Jews, Luther's intentions, after centuries, are being fulfilled(1)" (Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Juden, Mönche Und Luther, 1937). Anti-Semitism was the lingua franca of the Nazi era and was employed by church leaders to gain credibility with their own adherents—but also out of sincere anti-Semitic conviction. Anti-Semitism was also a tactic in the rhetorical battles among the different Christian factions, Deutsche Christen and Bekennende Kirche, with each accusing its opponents of being "Jewish" while positioning itself as the true Nazi believer(2).

Already in 1971 the late historian Uriel Tal challenged the entrenched view that racist anti-Semitism is a new phenomenon that repudiates Christianity by arguing that it was actually utterly dependent on Christian anti-Judaism for its success: "It was not the economic crises that brought about this new political, racial, and anti-religious anti-Semitism, but completely the reverse, it was precisely the anti-Christian and anti-religious ideology of racial anti-Semitism which hampered the first anti-Semitic parties in their efforts to utilize the economic crisis for their political development ... [because] what still attracted the masses was the classical, traditional Christian anti-Judaism, however adapted it may have become to the new economic conditions.(3)"

Tal demonstrated that Germany's anti-Semitic, völkisch movements that arose in the nineteenth century had to abandon their initial anti-Christian stances in order to win supporters who found Christian anti-Jewish arguments politically appealing(4).

Even within the so-called "church struggle" between German Christians and the Confessing Church for control of the Protestant church, anti-Semitism became the glue that united the otherwise warring factions. Similarly, however much Hitler made use of images of messianism, redemption, and other Christian motifs, the most useful and consistent aspect of Christianity for the Nazi movement was its anti-Judaism, just as the single most consistent and persistent feature of Nazism was its anti-Semitism.

While seeking to undermine the political power and moral authority of the churches, Nazism simultaneously appropriated key elements of Christian theology into its own ideology, both in order to win adherents used to Christian arguments and to give its own message a coherence and resonance with the age-old Christian teachings that had shaped European culture. The Deutsche Christen reversed the process, appropriating Nazi rhetoric and symbols into the church to give its Christianity a contemporary resonance. Both the Nazis and the Deutsche Christen identified Hitler as Christ's second coming. That gave Hitler the status of a supernatural being and gave Christ renewed glory as a contemporary figure of enormous political significance.

Meanwhile, Jews were not simply despised, but also seen as a danger to be eradicated. In this as in so many other issues, theologians anticipated and suggested anti-Jewish policy before it was formulated by the Nazi regime. On February 24-25, 1936, a few months after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws, but long before Jews were being deported and murdered, a group of theologians, some of whom subsequently became leaders of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, met in Dresden to discuss a merger of the German Christian factions of the state churches of Thuringia and Saxony. During the course of the meeting, Siegfried Leffler, a German Christian leader, official in the Thuringian Ministry of Education, and, by 1939, official head of the Institute, stated:

"In a Christian life, the heart always has to be disposed toward the Jew, and that's how it has to be.  As a Christian, I can, I must, and I ought always to have or to find a bridge to the Jew in my heart.  But as a Christian, I also have to follow the laws of my nation [Volk], which are often presented in a very cruel way, so that again I am brought into the harshest of conflicts with the Jew.  Even if I know "thou shalt not kill" is a commandment of God or "thou shalt love the Jew" because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ.(5)"

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, while perceived by many German Jews as a relief from the fear of far worse legislation, were viewed as an encouragement by the Deutsche Christen to take even more radical positions. Legal cases in German courts, brought in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws' criminalization of sexual relations and marriage between Jews and Aryans, and widely reported in the German press, implicated Jews as sexual predators of Aryans. That further encouraged Christian theologians to insist on protecting Christian purity by eradicating Jewishness with even more radical measures(6). The imagined penetration of Christian bodies by Jews(7) reiterated a typical motif of racist rhetoric, the dangers of miscegenation, and reinforced fears that Aryanism was not immutable, but subject to destruction by Jews. Anti-Semites had long insisted that German Aryan women were vulnerable to Jewish predation, and Jesus, whose gentleness and suffering were viewed as effeminate by Deutsche Christen, was depicted in one Nazi caricature as an Aryan woman on a cross with a lecherous Jewish man in the foreground: the crucifixion as the Jewish rape of Germany.

The use of laws and court procedures to control sexual relations within Germany and thereby create the Aryan racial nation was not in contradiction to Christian teachings; after all, as Jennifer Knust points out (in Abandoned to Lust, 2006) the apostle Paul, Justin Martyr, and other early Christian writers asserted that those who reject Christ are by definition sexually repulsive, licentious, and "unnatural" in their sexual behavior(8). Among the post-apostolic writers, the physical, and especially sexual, purity of Christians was the safeguard of moral and religious purity. Thus the Nuremberg Laws could easily be read as upholding classical Christian values and calling forth the sort of theological action that Leffler proposed just months after they were announced.

Why was it so easy to racialize Christianity? What made anti-Semitic ideas so appealing to Protestant theologians in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century? What are the affinities between theology and racism?  

Numerous historians have traced the origins of racist thought to the period of the Enlightenment and blamed its emergence on the decline of religious belief. Colin Kidd, however, has argued (in The Forging of Races, 2006) not that race emerges as a consequence of the undermining of religion, but that race is implicated as a major factor in bringing about the "unraveling of Christian certainties(9)." Starting in the eighteenth century, race, according to Kidd, helped undermine the foundations of Christian belief: the universalism of its message, the uniqueness and historicity of its teachings, and the reliability and coherence of its Scriptures. By the Nazi era, however, race played the opposite function: in its specific iteration as anti-Semitism, race was used by some theologians as a restorative force of coherence for Christian theology and for interpretations of the New Testament. Racism was viewed by many theologians not only as a political tool, but as an avant-garde method for understanding society and human nature.

By making use of racial arguments in their presentations of Christianity, members of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life thought they could bolster the appeal of Christianity to its Nazi despisers. Racism's argument that distinct and immutable orders exist in society lent support to a "theology of creation." One Institute member, Wilhelm Stapel, attempted to demonstrate that racism supported Christian claims to divine creation: Just as God had created societal orders—marriage, family, hierarchy, property, and so forth—God had given each Volk a task and place on earth(10). Believers in racial hierarchy could see it as an extension of the biblical account of God's creation of hierarchical orders within nature and society. Christians were told that racial hierarchies were an extension of the divine order. In both cases, the subservience of women to men, and the dominance of animals by humans eased the acceptance of racism.

Within the field of theology, racism was thought to restore the uniqueness, historicity, and significance of Jesus and his teachings, which had supposedly been undermined by historicism. Even if Jesus's teachings did not seem different from those of other Jews of his day, he was seen as distinct in his race—seen as an Aryan and not a Jew. His racial identity was then used to read his teachings not as reflections of Judaism, but as repudiations of it. The goal of the Institute was to use racial theory to eradicate all traces of Jewishness and restore the "original and authentic" teachings of Christianity. That goal was simultaneously political: Institute publications argued that the Jews were violent people who sought the destruction of Jesus and continue to strive for world domination and the subjugation of all Gentiles. The Institute presented the war as a defensive life-and-death struggle against the Jews, and also as a Christian war in the name of the authentic non-Jewish Jesus, the Christianity he sought to bring into being, and the battle to destroy Judaism that he failed to win. Like the German military, the Institute presented its cause as a total eradication of the enemy, Judaism, and not simply its segregation or expulsion from the Reich.

The dejudaization effort of the Institute has to be examined not only in terms of Third Reich politics, but also as a Christian theological phenomenon that engaged a vast number of pastors, bishops, and academic theologians. Christianity came into being by resting on the theological foundations of Judaism, and the relationship of Judaism to Christianity has often been described as a mother-daughter one. Nearly every central theological concept of Christianity rests on a Jewish foundation, from messiah to divine election. Affirming what is central to Christian teaching usually entails an affirmation of a Jewish idea or a text from the Old Testament, so that attempting to eradicate the Jewish was a kind of "theological bulimia(11)."

Ridding Christianity of everything Jewish was racism at the theological level. The appeal of racism to theologians remains a widespread problem not only in Germany and not only in the modern period. Theologians have long placed themselves at the service of racism, even as many have mustered religious arguments to combat it. The specific question raised by this study is how German Protestantism benefited from Nazi racism. Why were a sizable number of German Protestant theologians and pastors so drawn to racial theory that they created a form of racial theology? What theological benefit did they derive from racism?

The affinities between German Protestantism and racial rhetoric lie still deeper than similarities in particular teachings regarding Jews because race is ultimately concerned not with biology but rather with the human spirit. That was recognized by the racists themselves, who were concerned to define the spiritual natures of those they studied. Walter Wüst—a professor of linguistics at the University of Munich and rector of that university from 1941-1945, and later head of the Ahnenerbe, a research center established by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler to study Indo-Germanic origins—made the link between race and religion clear: "Today we know that religion is basically a spiritual-physical human activity and that it is thereby also racial(12)." Indeed, in the SS context, religion could survive only by being redefined as a racial phenomenon.

Long before the Nazi era, the concern of racists was not so much the inferiority of certain peoples' bodies—the shape of the nose or the cranium—as the degeneracy of their morality and spirituality and the alleged threat posed by such degeneracy to superior races. The body was presented as the physical representation of moral and spiritual qualities. Physiognomy was interpreted by philologists as signifying linguistic ability, language differences were taken as indicators of cultural levels, and "culture" was often interchangeable with "race."

Indeed, scientific measurements of the body were rejected by leading race theorists, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as irrelevant to Aryans, for whom knowledge was intuitive, an argument revived by Grundmann in his claim that Jesus knew God's wishes intuitively, through his heart, in contrast to Jews who know God through reason(13). What became key to racialist thinking was developing the proper hermeneutics: knowing how to "read" the body to learn what sort of moral and spiritual qualities are incarnate in it. The Jewish nose and hair, for example, are not dangerous by themselves, but anti-Semites see the Jewish body as the carrier of a degenerate Jewish morality. Training its readers in the proper hermeneutics for interpreting the Jewish body and knowing its inherent danger was the goal of anti-Semitic texts.

Thus, if physiognomy was described at length as signaling racial difference, it never stood alone. Rather, modern race theorists saw the body as a carrier of the soul, of moral and spiritual potencies, making race theory a kind of theology. As Richard Dyer writes in his study of whiteness (White, 1997), "For all the emphasis on the body in Christianity, the point is the spirit that is ‘in' the body. What has made Christianity compelling and fascinating is precisely the mystery that it posits, that somehow there is in the body something that is not of the body which may be variously termed spirit, mind, soul, or God(14)." It is the moral and spiritual threat of lesser races—such as Jews—that racists worried about; the inferior bodies of those races were carriers of their corrupt spirits, not causes of the corruption.

The tired argument that racism is about biology fails to recognize that racism emphasizes the dangers posed by the body to the spirit. Flesh is crucial to racialist thinking because the body is not simply a symbol of the degenerate spirit; rather, moral degeneracy is incarnate within the body and the two cannot be separated. The Jewish nose, for instance, is not dangerous in itself, but incarnates a moral decadence. The fundamental relationship between body and soul characterizing modern racist discourse is a mirror of the body-soul dilemma at the heart of Christian metaphysics, and is precisely the stamp that Christianity has placed on Western philosophy(15). Race additionally reinscribes the classical Christian distinction between the carnality of Judaism and the spirituality of Christianity.

Both racism and theology furthermore present themselves as discourses of morality, with particular attention to sexual morals. It is therefore not surprising that in its early years National Socialism professed support of Christianity, with Hitler portraying himself as a religious man defending Christian faith against the enemies of the church—Leftists and Jews. Hitler's use of Christianity was encouraged by the emergence of racial theology; for some Nazi propagandists, Christianity was a wonderful wellspring of anti-Semitism in creating what Richard Steigmann-Gall has called "The Holy Reich(16)." In this sense, too, the Institute's theology might be seen as treating Christianity as the body, National Socialism as the spirit—that is, making the church the bodily carrier of a Nazi soul, thus attempting to make Nazism incarnate in Christianity. At the same time, Nazism itself sought a supersessionist position in relation to Christianity, incorporating its key teachings into its own, more elevated political ideology, exploiting its language and ideational framework rather than trying to destroy it.

Only in the past fifteen or twenty years have historians begun to unearth this troubling history. What to do with its legacy remains a matter of conscience for us all.

I am deeply moved by the honorary doctorate you are presenting to me today, but even more by what it represents: your identification, as Christian theologians, with the critique of Christian anti-Judaism. When I was writing my talk, a passage from the Bible kept coming to mind: 1 Kings 18-19, the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah mocked the hundreds of false prophets as they worked themselves into an ecstatic frenzy, calling upon Baal and declaring their loyalty to the wicked King Ahab, whipping themselves until their blood poured out. In the end, Baal did not answer. Although these false prophets were defeated and put to death, Elijah did not rejoice. Instead, in deep despair and fearing Ahab's wrath, he fled into the wilderness and longed to die. Gently, God sent an angel to feed him, but that was not enough. Elijah hid in a cave for forty days and nights at the foot of Mount Horeb. And then God appeared to him—not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in a still small voice that gave him the courage to return and continue his prophetic struggle.

In Germany, too, the false prophets were defeated. You were not alive at that time, but the Nazi theologians were your teachers and the teachers of your teachers; their influence extended well beyond 1945, as we know. For some, there is despair, for others, silence; for all of us, horror. Yet Elijah shows us that evil is never the climax of history. In the midst of his despair, he recovered his vision and his prophetic courage. At the end of his life, he left a school of prophets, gave his mantel to Elisha, and ascended to heaven. My prayer is that we remember Elijah, hear that still small voice, overcome our despair, gird ourselves with courage, and take up the prophetic mantle of justice and truth.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and specializes in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Germany. This speech was given when she received an honorary doctorate from the Augustana Hochschule in Germany in April, 2008, and is based on her new book, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, published by Princeton University Press.

Source Citation

Heschel, Susannah. 2009. Strange Affinities: Biblical Scholarship and the Rise of Racism. Tikkun 24(2): 24.

Footnotes:

1. Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Juden, Mönche Und Luther (Weimar: Deutsche Christen, 1937).

2. Such tactics of disidentification can be found in other political conflicts within racist societies; for example, in the racism that prevailed among Afrikaner and the English in the struggle over South Africa during the Boer Wars. 

3. Uriel Tal, Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Antisemitism, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, No. 14 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1971).; reprinted in Uriel Tal, ed., Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)., 177.

4. "In reality Nazism accomplished but few of its goals. But in one area, that of the Jewish question, political myth achieved its purpose to the full. Here the regime met the least opposition from those who in other matters were hardly in accord with Nazism - be it intellectuals, the churches or public opinion in the Reich or abroad. The Jew served as the focal point round which Nazism turned and on which the structural process of value-transformation and reversal of meanings took place. Among the values and meanings that were transformed, the symbol itself was turned into substance; consequently, the negation of Judaism had to be transformed into the annihilation of the Jew, this time not spiritually but rather physically, not symbolically but in substance." Tal, 111.  

5.  Akte Thüringisches Volksbildungsministerium Signatur A 1400, Blatt 293. The meeting held February 24-25, 1936. Present: Paul Althaus, Martin Doerne, Erich Fascher, Meyer Erlach, Dedo Müller, pastors, church superintendents; Leffler, Leutheuser, Hugo Hahn, a church superintendent in Saxony who led the Confessing Church movement there, and Grundmann. It is striking that Anja Rinnen, in her biography of Siegfried Leffler, does not cite this document, and that Hahn does not describe the meeting in his detailed memoir of the period nor mention Leffler's comments. See Anja Rinnen, Kirchenmann Und Nationalsozialist : Siegfried Lefflers Ideelle Verschmelzung Von Kirche Und Drittem Reich, Forum Zur Pädagogik Und Didaktik Der Religion ; 9 (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1995). Hugo Hahn and Georg Prater, Kämpfer Wider Willen. Erinnerungen Aus D. Kirchenkampf 1933-1945 (Metzingen,: Brunnquell-Verl., 1969).

6. Patricia Szobar, "Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933 to 1945," History of Sexuality 11, no. 1-2 (2002).

7. On the centrality of fear of miscegenation in the racist discourse of colonialism, see Ann Stoler, "Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth," Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997).

8. Jennifer Wright Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 

9. Wolfgang Fenske, Wie Jesus Zum "Arier" Wurde. Auswirkungen Der Entjudaisierung Christi Im 19. Und Zu Beginn Des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005). Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122.

10. Stapel, who lectured at Institute conferences, was widely read and was one of the more sophisticated exponents of völkisch theology. Some of his publications include Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers (Hamburg, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933); Antisemitismus und Antigermanismus: Über das seelische Problem der Symbiose des deutschen und des jüdischen Volkes (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1928); Der christliche Staatsmann; eine Theologie des Nationalismus (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932); Volk: Untersuchungen über Volkheit und Volkstum fourth edition (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1942).

11. I would like to thank Richard M. Gottlieb for stimulating conversations about the metaphor of theological bulimia. I have developed that theme more extensively elsewhere; see Susannah Heschel, "Theology as a Vision for Colonialism: From Supercessionism to Dejudaization in German Protestantism," in Germany's Colonial Pasts: An Anthology in Memory of Susanne Zantop, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

12.Walter Wüst, Indogermanisches Bekenntnis (Berlin: Ahnenerbe-Stiftung Verlag, 1942)., 68; cited by Stefan Arvidsson, 187. Examples of collaboration between theologians and Nazi race theorists deserve further exploration; see, for example, Eugen and Kittel Fischer, Gerhard, Das Antike Weltjudentum: Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943).

13. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Lees, 2 vols. (New York: John Lane Co., 1910), Walter Grundmann, Die Gotteskindschaft in Der Geschichte Jesu Und Ihre Religionsgeschichtlichen Vorausetzungen. Studien Zu Deutscher Theologie Und Frömmigkeit 1 (Weimar: 1938).

14. Richard Dyer, White (London and NY, 1997), 16.

15. John L. Hodge, "Domination and the Will in Western Thought and Culture," in Cultural Bases of Racism and Group Oppression, ed. Donald K. Struckmann John L. Hodge, Lynn Dorland Trost (Berkeley: Two Riders Press, 1975).

16. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).